Reflections on Environmental Leadership: Thirty-Two Hours of Remarkable Coincidences

• Date: 01 January 2009

1-2009 NEWS & A NALYSIS 39 ELR 10083

Movies frequently entertain us with icons of wise lead-

ership. Yoda in Stars Wars is the serene, all-knowing

one who teaches Luke Skywalker the ways of The

Force to save the galaxy. Mr. Kesuke Miyagi in Karate K id

rescues the boy and goes on to mentor him to be at the top

of his f‌ighting rank. He could do all this because he had a

“brown belt” . . . from JC Penney. But in the real world, what

does it take to lead?

The media, public, and politicians currently are focused on

global warming, but there are scores of other environmental

threats with even more immediate consequences. Where are

the wise environmental leaders who can sort through all this

confusion and these competing priorities? Who will help guide

businesses and the governments toward a sustainable path?

Today these leaders appear to be as rare as spotted owls, but if

you ran into one, what would be his or her characteristics and

what traits should you emulate to reach that admirable position?

This is a “stream of consciousness” story of 32 hours in my

life spanning July 11-12, 2008. Some names have been omit-

ted to protect both the guilty and the innocent. As a colleague,

Sam Ofshinsky, always tells me after delivering a true, but

completely unbelievable story: “Ya just can’t make this stuff

up.” Well, I’m not making this up.

I. Precursor Events

For several weeks, I had been brooding over the suppression

of several well-documented facts from an article I wrote for

a trade publication. The editor was f‌ine with the original,

but a “review committee of the organization’s leadership”

decided to nix a few sentences, fearing that it might offend

advertisers and sponsors and thereby present a “business

risk.” This censorship was a f‌irst for me in the nearly 200

articles I have authored, so I asked other editors and writers

for their opinions. All of them expressed a view similar to that

of Ben Elgin, an environmental journalist with BusinessWeek:

“Pretty stunning.”

I was puzzled because I could not fathom how environmen-

tal professionals wind up on this slippery slope of unethical

business practice. In effect, they were putting a price tag on

the organization: if you sponsor or advertise with us, we will

not say negative things about your company, no matter how

true or widely known the information. I wondered, of all peo-

ple, how could environmental professionals—the protectors of

our planet—rationalize away such behavior?

Another issue troubling me was the continuing saga of Ari-

zona Public Service (APS), the local electric utility, where

I had once worked more than a decade ago. The company

appeared to be in a leadership crisis as top executives shuff‌led

in, out, and around the company. For example, the Palo Verde

nuclear power plant, the nation’s largest, has been rated one

level above shutdown since February 2007. As reported in the

Arizona Republic on July 1, the Nuclear Regulatory Commis-

sion (NRC) “could consider upgrading its ‘Category 4’ operat-

ing status by the end of 200 9. . . . There was a lot of denial

of problems and a lot of people not taking ownership of prob-

lems”—classic signs of dysfunctional management.

Over the same period, I also had been conducting research

for a magazine article unrelated to environmental issues.

The story described an event that took place near Albuquer-

que, New Mexico, in 1978. On ly a handful of people were

present, including the actor Steve McQueen. Ali McGr aw,

McQueen’s second wife, was f‌ilming Convoy in the area with

Kris K ristofferson and McQueen decided to visit his friend,

Sam Allred. The event was f‌ilmed by a news photographer

as a favor to A llred. Both worked at the local Channel 13

television station.

Twenty-two years later, a very brief clip of that event

appeared in the Academy Award winning documentary Bowl-

ing for Columbine. Probably not even Michael Moore knew

Reections on Environmental

Leadership: Thirty-Two Hours of

Remarkable Coincidences

The building blocks of environmental leadership reveal themselves

by Richard MacLean

Richard MacLean is President of Competitive Environment Inc., a management consulting f‌irm established in 1995 in Scottsdale,

Arizona, and the Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Innovation, a university-based nonprof‌it research organization.